Unified auction, not header bidding, drives more revenue for mobile in-game advertising

Optimizing ads are a hot topic these days, and we’re constantly witnessing disruption aimed at improving advertising transaction standards. Why? At the end of the day, it’s all about one thing — helping publishers maximize their revenue, and part of that discussion has been around a topic called header bidding.

What is header bidding?

Header bidding is an effort to address fairness within a real-time advertising auction. Online publishers add a short snippet of code into their page header that opens up more auctions and unlocks more money. It utilizes commonly bought prices as the targeting strings of line items, which are then prioritized in the ad server to be triggered. So the strings with the highest prices will have greater chance in delivering. The last element for this work is invoking the ad requests the moment the publisher’s header is loaded. So by the time the ad server is making a decision — all advertisers trying to get their hands on a 300-by-250 banner are all set and ready to go.